BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Rossetti: His Life and Works"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 16: Rossetti: His Life and Works. Ed. by Michael G. Brennan. Oxford University Press, 2017. 9780199683574. lxxxii + 284 pp.

Waugh is chiefly remembered as a novelist, but he also wrote a few biographies; the present volume is the first of these that I've read so far, and in fact it is Waugh's first book altogether — it appeared in 1928 (on the centennary of Rossetti's birth), a few months before his first novel, Decline and Fall. It wasn't his first foray into the subject, however, as he had published An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood two years earlier (this essay in fact induced a publisher to invite Waugh to write the biography of Rossetti; p. xxxv). [You would think that this essay would make for a nice appendix to the present volume, but unfortunately it hasn't been included in it; instead, it appeared in vol. 26 of the OUP Collected Works of Waugh.]

I was interested to learn, from the editor's introduction, that Waugh “showed considerable promise as a graphic artist” (p. xxvi), and designed some book jackets for Chapman & Hall, the publishing house where his father was a director (p. xxviii); for a time Waugh actually “hoped to avoid a literary career and establish himself as an artist-craftman” (p. xxxi), though that didn't work out. Several of his relatives had also been keen artists, and three cousins of his grandfather had been married to some of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner (p. xxvii). (On an unrelated note, another curious family connection: Waugh's wife's aunt was the sister-in-law of Gerald Duckworth, the publisher of Waugh's nonfiction books, including Rossetti; p. xxv, n. 1.)

You might say that the Aesthetic Movement consisted of two phases: the earlier one — the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones and the like — and the later one, with Wilde and Beardsley and the rest of the Decadents. I am in principle interested in the Aesthetic Movement, but really mostly in its second phase, and so didn't find a book about the life of Rossetti as interesting as I perhaps might have hoped.

Moreover, I had thought of Rossetti almost more of as a poet than as a painter — I bought a copy of the 1911 edition of his poetical works years ago, though I didn't get around to reading it yet; and though I may be poorly equipped to appreciate poetry, I'm still more poorly equipped to appreciate painting (though I do enjoy Rossetti's distinctive style; his women all look the same,* and quite unlike any women I've seen painted anywhere else). And yet, of course, in hindsight, it was foolish of me to think of him that way; he was a painter first and foremost, and this shows in Waugh's biography as well, which spends only a tiny fraction of its time on Rossetti's poetry, while discussing his painting at great length, dedicating at least a paragraph (and sometimes more like a page) to seemingly every painting and sketch he ever made, and sometimes going into far more technical detail than I had any hope of following (clearly Waugh put his early efforts at learning the graphic arts to good use here).

[*Incidentally, this seems to be because they are all based on three or four women who did most of the modelling for him. “They are of two main types [. . .] fair and voluptuous or dark and pensive according to whether Fanny Schott or Janey Morris was uppermost in his thoughts.” :)) (P. 97; see also pp. 141–2.)]

All this, in short, is a long-winded way of saying that I didn't really enjoy this book all that much, but that this is in no way Waugh's fault. He writes well, is often witty, keeps the story moving along at all times, and strikes a good balance: it is true he spends a lot of time appreciating Rossetti's paintings, but he also doesn't neglect his poetry, his personal life or — something I found quite interesting — the business aspects of his art.

Indeed for someone like me, who am still often inclined to imagine artists romantically as people working on the basis of divine inspiration, it was somewhat surprising and almost shocking to see how... workmanlike Rossetti was in his approach to his art. He painted for money, and not small amounts of it either; he often had a buyer lined up, and sometimes a down payment too, before he even started working on a painting; he often made several copies of a painting if he found people willing to buy them (pp. 100, 255–6, 263); and on a few occasions when he couldn't bring himself to finish a painting, he ended up cutting out some useful part of it and finishing that as a smaller painting. The general public didn't necessarily appreciate his work all that much in his lifetime, except towards the end; but he had a circle of friends and patrons who valued him, and he was content to paint for them (pp. 63, 154). In fact Waugh himself seems to have had doubts about the ultimate artistic value of Rossetti's work; he does praise a number of his paintings, but he concludes his biography with a chapter on “What is Wrong with Rossetti?” (p. 167).

His father was originally from the then Kingdom of Naples, from which he was exiled after the failed revolution of 1820–21 (p. 4); he ended up working as a professor of Italian in London (but his career suffered a couple decades later when “Italian was beginning to give place to German in English education”; p. 6). Another interesting relative of Rossetti's was his maternal uncle, Dr. John Polidori (p. 5), famous as the friend of Byron and the author of The Vampyre, a pioneering short story in the vampire genre.

I knew really very little about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood so far, and was interested to learn that although Rossetti was later sometimes thought of as its main founder (p. 63), the initial impetus came from two other artists, Holman Hunt and Millais (p. 16), while Rossetti was still very much a beginner and something of a disciple of Hunt (p. 18). But Waugh suggests that Rossetti must have had a prominent role in setting up the PRB from the start: “to Rossetti, reared among secret societies, lured to the guilds and apprenticeships of the Middle Ages, some such organization seemed the natural embodiment of an artistic impulse” (pp. 19–20). In 1849 the members exhibited paintings in their new style, with “P.R.B.” after their names (p. 23), and at first even deliberately refrained from explaining this acronym to the public! (until Rossetti gave it away; p. 26). The public was duly shocked by this “conspiracy”, but later began to view the Pre-Raphaelites more favourably once they got the support from Ruskin, then already a very influential critic (pp. 39–41).

“He [i.e. Rossetti] was always ready to praise artistic achievement of the most trifling merit with exaggerated respect; but that and physical beauty in woman were the only things he thought worthy of reverence.” (P. 46.) “‘If any man has poetry in him,’ he used to say, ‘he should paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it.’ ” (P. 58.) But Waugh suggests that this is because his poems dealt with “all the common emotions ornamentally expressed—no wonder that he should think it had all been done before. But for these very reasons they are poems that have given, and always will give, genuine pleasure” (p. 118).

In his best years he was making more than £3000 per year, but he was careless in spending his money (p. 84). “He collected almost anything that attracted his attention, particularly china, furniture, and animals. [. . .] His china collection was one of the first of its kind in England.” (P. 86. See also pp. 88–91 for an amusing anecdote where Rossetti played a practical joke on a fellow collector by filching a particularly fine china dish from him, but the victim subsequently got his revenge in like fashion.)

From the age of 40 or so, he started suffering from various health problems (p. 111), melancholy and insomnia, for which he resorted to drinking and later to taking chloral (p. 128; he took pride in the large doses he was taking, but his friends conspired behind his back to dilute them :))). Fearing that he was going blind and would no longer be able to paint, he took a renewed interest in his poetry (p. 113); but alas, he had buried the manuscript of his poems together with the body of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, some seven years before. Fortunately he was able to get official permission to open the grave and retrieve the manuscript (pp. 114–15).

He soon had the poems published as a book (Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1870), which his friends made sure to praise in all the magazines (pp. 115–16), but it was also the subject of a vicious attack by a critic named Robert Buchanan (“a common and prudish lowland Scot”, p. 126), who denounced Rossetti, Swinburne and other Pre-Raphaelite poets in an essay titled The Fleshly School of Poetry (1871). Judging by the quotations included here on p. 125, it must have been full of deliciously overblown rhetoric: “these abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease” :))

Sadly, this new-found notoriety exacerbated Rossetti's existing mental problems into a full-blown paranoia, and he even made a suicide attempt in 1872 (pp. 132, 134). With the help of his friends, he made something of a recovery and kept on painting for another five years or so; then his health got worse, and he died in 1882, a little less than 54 years old.

*

In my opinion a biographer ought to have enough sympathy for his subject to refrain from finishing his biography with a chapter on ‘what is wrong with him’, but clearly Waugh didn't see it that way. In the last chapter, “What is Wrong with Rossetti?”, he looks at Rossetti from the perspective of “the modern critical attitude” (p. 167), according to which “the ‘real’ artist fundamentally is someone interested in the form underlying the appearance of things. [. . .] Artistic perception begins with an appreciation of the reality of form, and becomes creative as it begins to associate forms with each other in necessary, and therefore agreeable, relationships; [. . .] Approached from this standpoint, Rossetti, with all his ‘temperament’ and ‘inspiration,’ is nothing but a melancholy old fraud. [. . .] The last thing he wished to do was to express the necessary relations of forms.” (P. 168.) To which all I can say is: to hell with the modern critical attitude then! How did they dare — how did critics living in the 1920s or 30s, a time when art was already deeply degenerate, and had been for some decades, dare — how did they have the sheer unmitigated temerity to pass judgement on someone like Rossetti, who had spent his life making beautiful things? Who the hell cares about the “reality of form” and the “necessary relations of forms”, and indeed what, if anything, do these phrases even mean?

“ ‘Pure’ painting, according to reputable standards, should concern itself solely with beauty and not with anecdote, but, more than this, it must be with its own beauty and not with the beauty of the thing represented; [. . .] Such a restriction was essentially foreign to Rossetti's habit of thought. [. . .] he knew no valid distinction between beauty of picture and beauty of subject.” (P. 170.) Again this seems to me to be something that discredits the so-called “reputable standards” rather than Rossetti's painting. The modernists wouldn't know beauty if it bit them on the butt. Or if they did know it, they would drive it away deliberately.

Lastly, Waugh criticizes Rossetti on moral grounds: “To the muddled Victorian mind it seemed vaguely suitable that the artist should be melancholy, morbid, uncontrolled, and generally slightly deranged. [. . .] This mischievous misconception found its fulfilment in the ’nineties when, in London and Paris, at any rate, most of the considerable artistic figures were in fact consumptive or perverted or epileptic” (P. 171.) In Waugh's view, Rossetti was a mild case of this as well: “there was fatally lacking in him that essential rectitude that underlies the serenity of all really great art. [. . .] There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organisation about all he did.” (P. 171.)

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find that I am on the completely opposite side from Waugh on all this. I will never lose the conviction that a true artist should die of poverty and consumption at an age not much above twenty, and my sympathies will always be with the uncontrolled, the slightly deranged, and the perverted. Living a well-ordered and temperate life, and dying of old age in your seventies or eighties, strikes me as a clear proof of an anything but artistic temperament. And frankly, I have no idea what exactly Waugh means by “essential rectitude” and “spiritual inadequacy”, but they sound like something that is at best orthogonal to artistic ability, and at worst actively contrary to it, and clearly Waugh is just projecting his own conservative values onto Rossetti.

Miscellaneous

The introduction mentions Waugh's “small but fluent handwriting, which posed few problems for his typist” (p. xliv), which surprised me since in earlier volumes in this series we often heard how illegible Waugh's handwriting was. Perhaps it got worse later in his career?

Since Waugh wasn't yet well known at the time this book was first published, some reviewers were unsure about his sex; one referred to him as “Miss Waugh” and another wondered “Mr (or is it Miss?) Waugh” (p. xlviii); “Waugh disliked his androynous name” (p. lxi) and wrote an angry letter pointing out that the reviewer should have looked at the dust jacket of the book, which refers to him as “Mr.” several times (p. lxii). :))

Rossetti's grandfather “was a blacksmith at Vasto, in the Abruzzi (or, as one of Rossetti's biographers prefers, ‘connected with the iron trade of that city’)” :)) (p. 4).

When William Morris went to Oxford: “Like many wise people before and after him, he found the life there pitiably disappointing.” (P. 54.) :]

Waugh on Rossetti's poem The Nuptial Sleep: “It is just the sort of poem, both in sentiment and sibilants, that schoolboys write in abundance, and the editors of school magazines have some doubts about accepting. As an example of Rosseti's art it is well left in obscurity.” (P. 126.) :))

William Morris lived in a rather small and crowded house although he was well-off; which Waugh comments on thus: “Perhaps it was his Welsh blood, prompting him to the native cosiness of caves and hovels.” (P. 138.) Wahahaha :))) The editor suggests that Waugh's “comic slurs against the Welsh” may have been prompted by his time working as a teacher in Wales (p. 192).

Waugh spends a lot of time analyzing the composition of Rossetti's paintings, the poses of the characters on them, etc. You can't help admiring his dedication: “I spent an exceedingly ungraceful half-hour before the looking-glass attempting to get into the same position.” (P. 157.)

While working on this book, Waugh met Hall Caine, a writer who had been a friend of Rossetti in his last years (p. 233).

It appears that Waugh remained interested in Rossetti until the very end of his life: amongst Waugh's books now in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas there is a copy of Rosalie Glynn Grylls' Portrait of Rossetti (1964) “with his MS annotations” (p. 274).

Errors

Fortunately for the OUP, it has no reputation left to lose when it comes to errors and misprints. Here are a few that I've noticed:

• When an apostrophe appears at the start of a word, it is often printed as ‘ instead of ’ — again someone has been searching and replacing too naively :) Thus we have “ ‘nineties” (p. xxx; but it's “ ’nineties” correctly on p. 171), “ ‘em” (p. 132), “ ‘fifties” (p. 117).
• “Quin dynasty” (p. 188) should surely be “Qin”.
• “Alexander Dumas” (p. 190) should surely be “Alexandre”.
• A closing ’ is missing after “inpugned” (p. 204; note that the word itself is not an error here, it just reports a misprint in the first edition of the biography).
• A closing ) is missing after “ ‘The Kraken’ ” (p. 242).
• “Prosperine” (p. 263) is obviously Proserpine's richer if less famous cousin :]
• “Dōppelgānger” (p. 62) is an impressively bizarre misprint of “Doppelgänger” — firstly because they used macrons instead of umlauts, and secondly because the o isn't supposed to have an umlaut either...
• “speciman” (p. 88), in a long quote from a book (the original spells it correctly).